With our 21st century penchant for planned obsolescence, you start to feel like anything that’s more than a couple years old is past its prime and headed for oblivion. But before you toss out your Blackberry, recycle all your CDs, and delete your MySpace page, consider this: pretty much everything we now know (or believe) about communication is derived from some ideas written down over 2000 years ago. Continue reading
writing
Engaging with the Ideas of Others: Using Reporting Language
What is “reporting language,” and why do I need it?
One of the most important modes of speaking and writing is referencing and responding to the ideas and views of others. Doing so situates your own writing within a larger conversation, which helps your interlocutor (whomever you’re communicating with) to understand why your discourse matters, and also gives him/her a frame of reference to interpret your meaning.
It’s essential to always clearly identify when you are restating the ideas of others by using reporting language, that is, sentences that explicitly attribute ideas to another source. In the first place, you should always give credit where credit is due. Furthermore, consistent use of reporting language is critical to the clarity of your own discourse; it helps you to distinguish your own position from that of others. Failure to use consistent reporting language can confuse your interlocutor as to what your own argument is. Continue reading
Tone-deaf FIFA Ad Glorifies British Colonialism
I’m a World Cup fan.
I’ll be honest: I don’t really follow soccer 3.9 years out of every 4 (or indeed, sports of any kind), but when the World Cup comes around, I’m there, donning my black, red, and gold, and shouting my head off. I spent the summer of 2006 in Berlin when they hosted the World Cup, and I caught the bug. There was so much hope and excitement in the air – I couldn’t help it. I’ve tuned in faithfully ever since, out of both nostalgia and a growing appreciation for the game.
So it’s without malice that I ask: what were they thinking with that ad for today’s Tunisia vs. England match? Continue reading
Student’s Guide to Communication | First Contact
There’s a lot of hype about the importance of first impressions. You never get a second chance, etc. etc. To a certain extent, this hype may overemphasize the importance of first impressions. After all, if you don’t reinforce that first encounter with a series of subsequent good impressions, the best first impression will cease to matter. But it’s certainly true that, in some instances, you will only get one shot at making an impression at all. In cases like job interviews or first contact with potential employers or investors, a poor first impression could lead to your being written off entirely. Even in cases where you have the opportunity to recuperate a first impression fail, you may end up having to work really hard to correct that initial judgment. So it’s worthwhile to make sure your first impression is a good one.
Student’s Guide to Communication | E-mail Basics
A while back, I published a post on best practices for e-mail communication with instructors and advisors; that post was primarily aimed at grad students, and though it would be useful for all students, it focused on the finer points of maintaining a collegial and professional tone in e-mail. Recently, I’ve been reminded that many students (even grad students) could benefit from some nuts-and-bolts advice for communicating effectively via e-mail, so I thought I’d tackle some of the most common issues I encounter in e-mail correspondence with my students in a series of posts.
To start things off, here are the four fundamental things you need to do when e-mailing your professors.
A Timely Reminder: Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech
“When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?
We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of its injurious trajectory. We claim that language acts, and acts against us, and the claim we make is a further instance of language, one which seeks to arrest the force of the prior instance.
Thus, we exercise the force of language even as we seek to counter its force, caught up in a bind that no act of censorship can undo.”
— Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
In recent days, a great deal of thought, and even more raw emotion, has been generated by the topic of rhetoric — rhetoric about politics, about race and culture, about identity and belonging, and about exclusion and distrust. I think now, more than ever, we as a society are confronted with the power — the potentially abusive power — of language.
And yet, when considering the power language has to wound, I cannot help recalling Judith Butler’s assertion, in Excitable Speech, of the paradoxical nature of language’s power — that in trying to curtail the power of language, we inadvertently accede to it. Then again, in accepting the power language has over us, we can likewise recognize it as a power we can wield. Though the book is now creeping up on its twentieth anniversary, it seems more relevant than ever to remember both the warning and the promise it contains.
Fallacies, Episode II: The Use and Abuse of Evidence
In episode I, you learned about logical fallacies that represent mistakes in moving from our premises to our conclusions, due to bad logical form. But even if we’re careful to support our conclusions with reasoning and evidence, we can often run into problems with the evidence itself. “Facts” are supposed to be objective — but facts need to be interpreted, and this process is often subjective.
For that reason, evidence can often mislead and confuse. Have we interpreted it correctly? Do we have enough context to understand what it really indicates?
As consumers of media, we need to be aware of how frequently the supposed “evidence” that supports a claim can be misinterpreted and misused.
As thinkers and writers, we must make sure that we always consider source and context to ensure that we are using evidence appropriately.
Fallacies, Episode I: Bad Form
Many mistakes in logic occur due to problems with our premises – the information or assumptions we use as our starting point when we begin to reason. But some are down to the way we put those premises together to draw conclusions – that is, they occur because we use bad logical form.
Learn more about logical form.
Logical Fallacies Exposed
Logical fallacies are examples of fallacious, or faulty, arguments. At best, they represent flawed reasoning—making claims that are not supported by reasons or warrants, or drawing conclusions that don’t match up to the information you have. At worst, they can be deliberate attempts to mislead or confuse someone, to persuade through providing misinformation, usually to serve some hidden agenda. Many of the logical fallacies we will examine are common mistakes we all make, but some of them are established propaganda techniques.
Best Life Hack | Logical Reasoning
Reasoning, in its most fundamental sense, is the process by which we take bits of information and knowledge that we already have, and compare or combine them to generate new knowledge. It describes our ability to move from what we know to what we don’t know.
We do this by drawing conclusions from a set of premises – things we already know (or believe) to be true. The way we combine the premises to produce a conclusion is called an argument. The goal is to construct a sound argument so that we draw conclusions in such a way that they are guaranteed – or at least very likely – to be true. We want to come to the right conclusions, but this can be tricky.
criticalreading.net 